Nova Nukers at Gamescom 2016

One of our favourite booths from last year, both because of the awesome people, but also because of their really fun-to-play multiplayer game, was the one of Space Orange Studios. This year, they returned with their game, Nova Nukers, in order to have the public see it once again by visiting the Indie Arena Booth. We however, did more than that and sat down and had a chat with the devs behind the game.

Nova Nukers is a local multiplayer and apparently friendship-wrecking game, which puts four, soon to be ex-friends to face each other in epic battles of destruction. The battlefields are tiny planets, which are affected by the damage the weapons cause. The formerly majestic landscapes soon turn to post apocalyptic wastelands, which increase the difficulty of the game and guarantee a different experience each time the game is played. Choose from a variety of devastating and silly weapons (see sharkooza) and be the last man standing on the planet! Or get revenge by blasting the battlefield with lasers after you are killed!

We had the chance to talk to Julian Schmidt and Linda Treffler, two of the developers of Space Orange Studios and they told us all sorts of things about the updated Nova Nukers. The game went through Greenlight in the start of 2016 and after a lot of search for financing, they found funding from a publisher in China. For that reason, they also won’t go into Early Access and they are planning a full release on Steam and Xbox One around October or November this year.

“The game is basically miniature battlefields with destructible environment where the player tries to catch other players by stunning them first with all sorts of weaponry.” The studio is comprised of five people plus an intern at the moment and the game has changed in various ways. There is no longer a net gun, but instead there is an absorb gun which provides a whole different strategic element to the game. You can actually avoid it now which makes things a lot more tricky than before. It was always about having a 2-phase combat system, but now it got more interesting.

The game has been in development for 14 months and what we saw last year was the work of just a couple months, which is quite surprising seeing as how the game already looked very good and very promising. The developers said they got a lot of valuable feedback in Gamescom 2015 and they implemented a lot of new things, such as a melee attack (that can be used to dash and stun opponents). “No more running around helpless because you do not have a gun.” The ease of understanding and jumping into the game has improved a lot as well, which from what the developers said, was reportedly one of the most important parts that needed fixing in the game.

One of the biggest difficulties that Space Orange told us found while developing the game was that Julian basically had to work alone on the destructible environment and because there are a lot of different planet surfaces, there were a lot of issues with making everything work and be dynamic too.